Archive for the 'PowerPoint' Category

Why would anyone not use slides?

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Maybe because your presenting at a meeting on a small tropical Island that has
no electricity. To me having a meeting without projected visuals is like professional carpenter refusing to use a power saw or other power tools that would enhance his ability to complete the project at the highest quality and in the least amount of time.

Sure there are there are a few situations that may be better to avoid the
slides, but I personally can’t imagine many that would not benefit from the
addition of visuals to help focus the meeting participants on the key messages
of the meeting.

In 20 years of assisting speakers develop effective visuals to support their
communication, I have never heard the complaint “that was a great meeting, and
those slides were a big waste of time”. I have heard the opposite plenty of times
that the enhanced slides helped make it a great meeting.

I would love to find a research study, where a presenter used slides with a speech one day and did the same speech the next time with no slides and measured audience response and memory of content.

The People Cost Meter for your next meeting

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

People often forget about one of the most important cost factors of a meeting – the audience’s compensation. I’ve seen people balk at the cost of a $1000 cost of PPT visual support costs. This is kind of penny wise, but pound foolish if they considered the 400 people in thier audience was probably costing them $20,000+ per hour. And the cost of not communicating thier important message could priceless.

www.payscale.com came up with a cute little widget tool to monitor the cost of your meeting. Check it out: Meeting Cost Minder.

Meetings Drive Deadlines!

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

I believe that one of the reasons that people generally do not like meetings, or hate meetings is that along with a meeting typically comes some hard deadlines. There is usually more than just a deadline for the speech and slides, but the information being reported in the speech and slides. There’s lots of pressure to get the tasks requested to be completed from the last meeting to be completed by the next meeting so you can report that the task has been completed. Now with the ease and speed of producing or editing a PowerPoint slide, you can work on a task right up to the last minute before the meeting and update the task as completed just in time for the meeting. It’s a grown up version of peer pressure. You have to face the entire group at the meeting and report you success and/or failures. I’d write more, but I have to complete a task or two before my next meeting.

Top Ten Presenters of all time?

Monday, October 15th, 2007

A friend of mine sent me an article on someone that listed what they thought were the top presenters of all time. top ten presenters the list is from the knowHR blog. Steve Jobs is listed. He’s one of my top ten. Guy kawasaki is another good one. Dr. Martin Luther King – yes. But they leave out people like John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. They also include Andy Kuafman? Maybe there should be a site to vote and keep a running Top Ten Presenters list like the New York Times best book seller list?

Does anyone use PPT 2007?

Monday, October 1st, 2007

I’ve only heard bad things about PPT 2007, such as they changed all the quick key short cuts. No one I know is using it. Of hundreds of clients we have working with PowerPoint, no one has requested it to be in 2007? PPT 2003 works well. It is reliable. Fast. What more do we need? Check out PPT 2007 at Microsoft.com

You Are Allowed ONLY 30 Slides

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

I have heard this before, but once again I heard from a client that they were being told to limit the number of slides to 30 for thier meeting. This is rediculous because the number of slides should have no bearing on the time/cost of designing and producing the slide or speaker time. Sure the is a differnce in presenting 30 slides or 100 slides but 30 vs 50 can make no difference in the time/cost of producing the slides nor the time it takes to present them.

The key is producing slides that help communicate your information. Cramming 4 slides of information onto one slide takes longer to produce than four seperate slides. More important, is that it can take less time to speak to 4 seperate slides, than 4 slides of informatin on a single slide. The information on the individual slides will often communicate the information more efffectively than the crammed single slide representing the 4 slides.

It is silly to think that condensing 4 slides down to one is gong to improve your meeting communication. Yes you should always look to summerize and make your point with efficient use of slide space real estate  and numbers of slides, but don’t fall for the 30 minute speech means a 30 slide maximum. The general rule I go by for slides is “less is more”. I have seen great speakers zip through 100 exciting, fast moving, impactful slides in 30 minutes. I have also seen too many horrible speakers spend one and a half hours with ten slides. What speaker would you rather listen to?

It’s the Process of Getting There!

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

We had an important meeting yesterday with one of our bigger clients. Since we are in the business of producing presentions, we often go presentationless for our own meetings. We’re often too busy meeting client’s presentation production deadlines to work have time to work on our own.

But we decided this meeting had a level of importance that demanded the attention and effort it would take to prepare a good presentation deck. About a week before the meeting, I started the process by putting together an outline of notes and pulling together some ideas to modify and build  few new slides to our core pitch deck.

 My partners and I emailed back and forth some notes about the meeting strategy and the key points we wanted to communicate. We decided that even if we did not end up using the slide deck, by developing the PowerPoint deck, it would be a good road map of our meeting communication strategy.

We met a number of times to dicuss the strategy and review the deck. In reviewing the deck and developing the individual slides we planned and strategized what we would say, what was important, how to say it, and what not to say. We asked each other questions, we asked questions we thought our client might ask and guessed reactions to the messages we were going to say and emphesize with supporting visuals. We added some slides, deleted others and ehanced the most important.

We did get to use our slides after a few anxious moments of room projector technical glitches. The slides with high visual value to ehance what I was saying as the primary speaker, kept us on track and I feel we did get to say all we planned to say and more. It was a good meeting. I’m not sure of the final outcome yet – as the agreement discussed has yet to be signed. But the slides helped get our message communicated. But they also helped us develop the message. We had time for questions during our presentation and time left over to discuss things further after the last slide. We were prepared to answer every question thrown at us, even the hard ones.

In the end we experienced first hand the added value we often speak of when we help clients develop a PowerPoint deck , that it is not only more effective slides you end up with, but the process of developing the better slides with high visual value – helps prepare for a successful meeting!

Fear of Looking Too Good?

Friday, August 17th, 2007

I spoke to a client today that said his boss and management team was very conservative in thier “look”. They did not like anything to fancy or polished. He said they refrain from too much creativity because they are afraid of looking too good and people thinking they spent too much money to look good. This was an executive in a Fortune 500 company.

This is nuts. These people don’t get the difference between a “pretty” slide vs an effective slide. The idea is to develop a visual that effectively communicates your message. That means the audience gets it quickly, or easy to comprehend and remember.

Maybe these companies that use this excuse for boring, ugly, distracting slides (but look like they did them themselves – cheap) would not be in such cost cutting modes if they had a culture that made the most of thier critical meeting time with effective visuals.

I have often wondered if I could create an investment fund based on the quality of the companies visuals – I would bet it could be a good indicator of a companies health and future.

Good Speaker, Bad PowerPoint

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

I went to a meeting today attended by about 30 people.  It is a networking group I’ve been involved with for years and know the presenter for as many years. He’s an author and very good speaker. I always enjoy his presentations. He has an incredible amount of energy, enthusiasm, and always very knowledgeable of his speaking topic. He also has a great sense of humor that makes his presentations very entertaining.

But his PowerPoint today seemed to be 90% bullet points. He could have just as well handed out (after the meeting), a MS word document with an outline of his speech. He is a good enough speaker to probably get away with out speaker support slides. BUT, if he took the time, or had the time to develop his visuals to support his information rather than just be a duplicate of what he was saying, he could become an exceptional speaker.

He didn’t read his slides. He’s way beyond that in his presentation delivery skills. He basically paraphrased the bulleted text on each slide. Better visuals would help him keep on track and leave more time for his great improvising, personal stories, and humor. His slides would have been easy to enhance and could have made a good presentation into a great presentation.

“PowerPoint has become the lingua franca of business meetings worldwide” says The Washington Post

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Many people love to hate PowerPoint because they have sat through way too many ugly, useless, distracting PowerPoint slide shows. They may not be happy to read this article in the Washington Post : School Adds PowerPoint to Application – washingtonpost.com

“But at one of the world’s top business schools, such slide shows are now an entrance requirement. In a first, the University of Chicago will begin requiring prospective students to submit four pages of PowerPoint-like slides with their applications this fall.”

This article and others about the University of Chicago finally acknowledging that PowerPoint is one of today’s standard business communication tools will hopefully persuade others to recognize the imporatance and value of good PowerPoint slides. They call it the “lingua franca of business meetings”. I call it the standard language of business meetings.

In the article, they say Microsoft estimates that 30 million PowerPoint shows are presented every day!